Minister calls for Ross and Brand to pay BBC's £150,000 'lewd phone calls' fine

Published on Saturday 4 April 2009 19:57

A £150,000 FINE imposed on the BBC over the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand lewd phone calls scandal should be paid by Ross and Brand themselves, not the public, Cabinet minister Hazel Blears has suggested.

Regulator Ofcom imposed the fine last week for what it called the "gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning" prank calls to veteran actor Andrew Sachs, broadcast in October on Brand's Radio 2 show.

"I was quite surprised when I read about this, that Ofcom were fining the BBC," the communities secretary told BBC Radio 4's Any Questions. "The BBC is funded by all of us as licence payers so, actually, are we having to pay the fine?

"Then I thought maybe Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand should pay it … that might be quite a good idea."

Blears spoke out after calls, some from opposition politicians for Ross to pay the fine from his own wage – estimated at 6million a year.

Ofcom said the fine – a record for the BBC for a single case – reflected the "extraordinary" nature and seriousness of the BBC's failures and breaches of the Broadcasting Code.

It said the corporation broadcast explicit, intimate and confidential information about Georgina Baillie, Sachs's granddaughter, in both programmes without consent.

Liberal Democrat media spokesman Don Foster said: "This money should come out of Jonathan Ross's salary so that broadcasting does not suffer as a consequence of this error."

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said the BBC's safeguards were "riddled with holes". He added: "The public needs to know that this is never going to happen again."

Two episodes of Brand's show, broadcast on October 18 and 25, breached the code. The first, a pre-recorded show, included claims that Brand had slept with Miss Baillie, and the second contained an "apology song" in which intimate references to her personal life were repeated.

In the furore that followed the calls, which sparked more than 40,000 complaints, Brand resigned and Ross was suspended without pay for three months. Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas and head of compliance Dave Barber also resigned.

Ofcom said: "Creative risk is part of the BBC's public service role. However, so is the management of that risk.

"In this case, Ofcom's investigation revealed that, despite the Russell Brand show being considered by the BBC to be 'high risk' prior to these episodes, the broadcaster had ceded responsibility for managing some of that risk to those working for the presenter, Russell Brand.

"The presenter's interests had been given greater priority than the BBC's responsibility to avoid unwarranted infringements of privacy and minimise the risk of harm and offence and to maintain generally accepted standards."

The watchdog highlighted weaknesses in the BBC's compliance systems, including a lack of clarity about who had editorial oversight of the series and insufficient monitoring of the compliance systems in BBC Audio & Music in general.

No senior manager at Radio 2 listened to the pre-recorded programme of October 18 in its entirety before broadcast and there was a failure to obtain the informed consent of Sachs.

There was also no attempt to obtain consent from Baillie as required by the code and the BBC's own editorial guidelines, Ofcom found.

Ofcom said the incident was all the more extraordinary because of assurances given in the summer of 2008 by the BBC. Douglas had told the regulator that compliance at Radio 2 was "very, very, very high".

And the BBC's deputy director-general, Mark Byford, had given assurances that the compliance paperwork for BBC Radio had always been "absolutely there".